Filling the bookshelves of the university library: an easy task ?
When studying in this master’s degree, we often visit the university library. Whether it is for our classes or for our master’s thesis, books are essential components of our academic journey. However, we can all agree that we are often confronted to overly expensive books that can be hard to find; especially if we compare (but can we really compare?) our situation to the one of Oxbridge students whose university libraries have a budget that can hardly be imaginable for university libraries in France.
That is why I wanted to learn more about our university library to answer an essential question: how are the shelves of the English section filled? To answer this, I asked Mrs. Elsa Cherbuy, the librarian in charge of the English section, about the purchasing policy of the library and how she makes the tough choice of selecting books to add to the collection. She told me that she was monitoring several websites designed for librarians such as Electre for French books or Erasmus Books for international references. Monitoring also implies following up with the news of the literary world: she explained that she sometimes buys novels after hearing about them in newspapers or on the radio. I also asked her if she was working with the teachers of the English Department or of the LERMA and she put the emphasis on their partnership as the teachers often play an important role in the purchasing policy by spotting books in connection to their research or to their field of teaching. Besides, the books they publish are automatically purchased which shows the role of the library in helping to drive research further.
Each librarian is in charge of one or several domains (such as English, psychology, history etc…) and thus has to manage the budget allocated to these domains. However, since the general budget of the library has a tendency to decrease, it is not surprising that the librarians are seeing their budget decline too. And for smaller fields, like
ancient Greek for instance, we may wonder if in the near future some of these would perhaps disappear due to lack of funding. Elsa Cherbuy told me that it had never happened since she started working at the university library and that the only way a field would lose its budget would be if it were no longer studied at AMU. This underlines the close link between what is taught at university and the collection management at the library. However, she recognized that some fields were decreasing in popularity and gave the example of Asian languages: now Chinese is less studied than Japanese or Korean, consequently the budget is spent to buy more manuals of Japanese and Korean than of Chinese. There are choices to be made that are not always easy and require a close knowledge of the collections but also of academic life. Besides, politics is something to take into account. In 2021, the Service Commun de la Documentation (which gathers all of AMU’s university libraries) was inspected by a governmental organisation which concluded, among other things, that the budget given to the libraries ought to be bigger. This is an argument that could actually be used by the director of the SCD within the university governance.
Besides, the digital resources are another component of the collection management, and they take up a huge part of the budget too. Librarians are not in charge of these digital collections, they are managed by another branch of the SCD, but the librarians are now starting to buy eBooks. These are quite expensive, and Mrs. Cherbuy explained that they had to adapt to this new way of working. However, at the moment, these eBooks are less visible on the online platform of the university library, which makes them less profitable and thus librarians are working with colleagues to make sure that they are easily accessible for the students, which is, of course, their main goal.
Finally, we got the chance to talk about the purchasing policy put in place when it comes to books to prepare competitional exams such as the Agrégation. She mentioned that every year a significant amount of the total budget for the English collection is dedicated to preparing teachers’ examinations, such as Agrégation. Yet, the books that are bought from special collections and that are centred on the Agrégation are generally only borrowed by students during the two-years period when they are the topic of the exams. Indeed, when we looked at the statistics, most of these books were no longer borrowed once they were no longer on the Agrégation curriculum. It is an interesting point to take into account, especially as the general budget is not increasing but rather decreasing. Thus, there are many factors to take into account and filling the library’s shelves is not an easy task.
We might not be in the Library of Babel imagined by Borges where all possible books are to be found, but there is a willingness, despite the financial aspects, to offer students the largest choice of books possible.
Many thanks to Mrs. Cherbuy for her time and precious answers, first on the 15th of November 2022 and then, during my internship at the university library of Les Fenoullières, from the 3rd of April 2023 to the 5th of May 2023.
Bibliography
Image: © pixabay
Photographies of the library were taken by the author of this article.
OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
gmota (14 mai 2023). Filling the bookshelves of the university library: an easy task ? EN-globe. Consulté le 10 novembre 2025 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/oe7m


